Obama's Divisiveness Aims to Distract Voters

One of the old tricks of European monarchies, social democracies and communist states for millenia past has been to distract the people from economic mismanagement and decline by introducing a scape goat or highly charged issue to deflect public attention. Perhaps the classic literary example of this is in the beginning of Shakespeare's Henry V when the Archbishop of Canterbury designs to suggest to the King that he is entitled to the kingdom of France under the Law of Salique in order to distract him from considering imposing a tax on church lands. And, of course, the Czars of Russia and later the Communist regimes frequently used the Jews to distract the populace from the mismanagement and poverty that the highly centralized feudalist system of Russia entailed. This strategem continued on through the Communist era. Today, Le Pen of France attempts a similar strategy.

The Obama campaign resorts to the "distraction card" in order to deflect attention from his intent to reenforce failed social democratic economic policies, especially the Federal Reserve Bank, economic regulation and cartelization of health care, that have increasingly impoverished the average American. Since the international gold standard was abolished in 1971, workers' average hourly real wage has declined worse than one percent per year, but the mass media has been telling the public that there is no inflation and that things are great because of cell phones even though both parents now work two jobs whereas thirty years ago one parent worked one job. Academic economists, the media's high brow equivalent, attribute economic decline to marginal income tax rates, a non-sequitor.

Given the economic instability that the social democratic system has created that go well beyond nonsensical explanations like marginal tax rates, Obama has decided to emphasize divisive race issues. Thus, John McCormack of Weekly Standard (hat tip Larwyn) reports that ABC News has video of Barack Obama telling voters in Missouri that the Republicans

"are going to try to...make you scared of me. You know he--oh, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all of those other presidents on those dollar bills."

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt (hat tip Larwyn) reports that Obama favors reparations:

"I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds."

By raising the reparations issue Obama aims to distract Americans from the economic pain that they are about to suffer at the hands of our national economic planning czars, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson and their identical-twin-replacements under an Obama administration. What better way to distract from economic crisis than the reparations bugaboo?